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Kind of an interesting article but I think that most of what is called rape, is consensual sex between an older woman and a younger (less than 18 year old) male.

In a situation concerning myself at an early age, what happened was really bizarre and I couldn’t deal with it at first. I didn’t know how to define it at the time. It was 1968 and at a bungalow colony in upstate NY. I was 14. I had been spying on a group of girls for a few weeks; yes, they were very lovely and I simply couldn’t control my emerging hormones. Anyway, they tried to catch me several times but I always managed to get away. I was peering in the window of their bungalow and that really pissed them off. There were ten of them and the oldest was 19 and the youngest was about 16. Anyway, I got caught the last night they were there. They grabbed me and I thought they were simply going to call the police, the manager of the bungalow colony, etc. Instead, they pulled me inside, dragged me into one of the rooms, stripped me naked, held me down on the bed and, well, gave me a rather embarrassing first time. Oh and they were laughing the entire time. On the other hand, I was in a state of shock about how my body was reacting to what was going on. Anyway, I was then pushed out of the bungalow, naked and my clothes were tossed out alongside me. I was so embarrassed, I simply grabbed whatever clothes I could get my hands on and ran into the night, back to where I was staying. Somehow, this got around and I was eventually questioned by both the police and the management of the bungalow colony. Probably something would have happened, as far as criminal charges, but by then, the girls had left and no one knew where. I don’t know. Would this have been called rape?

Only you can decide wether what happened to you is rape. I think we can establish, though, that you had sex against your will, and they employed shaming tactics against you (laughing, throwing you out without clothes) as perpetrators tend to do when they want to hurt their victims. Many male survivors of female-perpetrated sexual abuse report a feeling of embarassment, with varying levels of trauma. Whatever the case, I am sorry you had to go through that. Your story reminds me an awful lot about a different case:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-478781/Sick-happy-slap-girl-gang-sexually-abused-teenage-boy-jailed.html

I’m glad to hear that your community did not condone what had happened, if I understand it right. Those girls’ behavior is predatory.

Up until recently, I had always laughed at stories of so-called abuse of boys by women. As an adolescent, I remember that both I and my friends had very lurid fantasies about older women, particularly teachers or authority figures in their 30s and 40s. In recent years, quite frankly, I thought the hysteria around high profile cases of female teachers having affairs with their students (eg Mary Laturneau) was just more luridness: local TV stations and media describing these cases for a puritan, but sex-obsessed, megachurch-going suburban audience. However, recently, I have begun to worry a bit about myself.

My first sexual experience was when I was about five years old, with my thirteen/fourteen year old baby sitter. She used to allow or encourage me to clamber all over her body, and on one occasion allowed me to go to cuddle her under bedcovers. She had stripped down to bra and panties, and essentially let me go to third base. The memory of this persisted with me through childhood and adolescence. I actually considered myself lucky, but the experience also affected me… I have never been comfortable making the first move with a girl/woman, and nearly always put myself in a situation where she clearly has the upper hand. I was also attracted to older women, and found the much more interesting than women my own age.

As I reflect on my experience, I am beginning to understand that appropriate boundaries between older women/girls and younger boys are important after all. Just as men must be careful not to exploit the advantages that their age may give them with underage girls, so should women respect the boundaries of younger boys, however much those boys may crave that inappropriate intimacy.

I don’t think it’s bad that you are overly cautious of your partners’ boundries, but you also need to make sure that nobody is overstepping YOUR boundries. They are always important, not only when there is an age gap. Your partners have a duty to establish consent as well as you do. That’s why I’m saddened when men say they ‘wouldn’t mind getting raped’ or similar; they don’t realise that they can be subjected to sex they don’t want, and that they have a right to enforce their boundries.

By the way, five years is generally too early an age for a child to have sexual desires on his or her own. It’s not my place to tell you what happened, but it seems unlikely to me that you craved sex with her, and that she did nothing more than allow it. We often reframe bad things that happen to us so they align with what we expect of ourselves. It reminds me of Pal Sarkozy’s account of how he ‘seduced’ his adult nanny at age 11. I am glad that you suffered no severe trauma. However, every person is different, and if another boy who has had your experience were to call himself a victim of sexual abuse, I would acknowledge that. At the very least, what happened to you was not normal, and I hope you will be able to have a sexual life without fear or shame.

Even this blog post isn’t accurate. The numbers of female sexual predators of boys are much higher than this article reports.

Johnson and Shrier, 1987 found that 60% of males report sexual abuse by women

Fromuth and Burkhart, 1987, 1989 and Seidner and Calhoun, 1984 found that self-reports by male college students, 72% to 82% were sexually abused by women.

In the back grounds of male rapists, 80 to 90% report being sexually abused or raped by women as children.

Also, I would have to hunt for these studies, but in studies of college students that include males, college age young males report being “coerced into unwanted sex” by college-age young women as often as and even more than the women.

I’ve read a lot of studies that bust theories and show men/boys are victimized (mostly by women) nearly as much as girls/women, but 60% doesn’t seem to pass the sniff test.

Also in this sentence:
“1984 found that self-reports by male college students, 72% to 82% were sexually abused by women.”
This sounds strangely like a SLOP (self-selecte listener opinion polls). Using self-selection (in which only a small fraction of the polled people are counted because they responded and others didn’t) isn’t a scientific way to count anything.

I could release an article asking people who hate their fathers to respond about it. Since, only those who hated their fathers would be likely to respond the survey could show that 100% people hate their fathers. But the hidden secret is that may have only been the 2% polled who took the time to respond.

One prominent American has revealed that he was abused and teased, as a boy and teen, by his own mother: the Broadway musical composer Stephen Sondheim, perhaps best known as the author of lyrics for West Side Story. He did not reveal this fact about his life until after his mother’s death 15 years ago.

Well, any female is seen as a whore if she rapes a male and deserves a harsher sentence because it’s not proper for females to be sexually forward. Female rapists, sex traffickers, nor other aggressive females never benefit from double standards. They can get hurt easily by them. Society doesn’t tolerate aggressive women who are on the prowl for sex.

For a sexual predator, it’s a lot more preferable to be seen as a whore rather than a rapist, as evidenced by the fact that women who rape are even less likely to be arrested than men, and when they are, they receive smaller sentences. To be honest, I don’t care how rapists are “hurt” by “double standards”, I just want them to face consequences for their actions.

[…] comes up in discussion, there is often a reflexive pointing out that women rape, too, as in this Women Rape, Too post. Saying that sexual violence affects girls and women disproportionately does not mean that […]

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